Backups, sheesh

Since my hard drive failure early in September (from which I recovered fully, but not without some effort), I decided to implement a more robust back-up system for our home computers. Drake and I both have iMacs which are situated side-by-side in our home office.

You would think it would be as easy as buying an extra drive and installing some backup software. But noooo, it's a bit more involved than that. Thanks to the eBook Take Control of Mac OS X Backups I am now fully educated on the intricacies of a robust backup system, including a bootable duplicate of my system and an archive of user-created files. And yes, these are different and you need both. And, guess what - not all Firewire drives are capable of creating a bootable volume (this is not something that is highlighted on the box). And, oh, it's best that you partition your back-up drive so that your Archive and Duplicate reside on separate volumes.

Here's what I used for my system:

Take Control of Mac OS X Backups - this is 97 pages, minus the Apendixes, and I did pretty much read the whole thing.

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Hard Drive - two of these - one for Drake, one for me

SuperDuper - software to create the bootable duplicate.

Apple's Backup 3 - software to create archives. If you don't have a .Mac account, the Mercury Drive comes bundled with Retrospect Express, which also works for archiving.

iDisk (or other Internet-based disk storage) for critical and working files you would need to access in case of a big disaster.

I also have my iPod Video set to copy full-resolution versions of my iPhoto library to it as extra insurance. This is how I restored my photos after my September drive failure.

We finished getting this all set up this afternoon. One big tip: you can schedule overnight backups even if your computer is off or asleep by going into System Preferences > Energy Saver > Schedule... and setting your computer to start up/wake up about five minutes before the backup is schedule to start.

So here's to finishing one big fat to-do on my list.